| Torsten Hoefler Awarded ACM Prize In Computing |
| Written by Kay Ewbank | |||
| Friday, 04 April 2025 | |||
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Torsten Hoefler, a professor at ETH Zurich and Chief Architect for AI and Machine Learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, has been awarded the 2024 ACM Prize in Computing. The ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, made the award to Hoefler for "fundamental contributions to high-performance computing and the ongoing AI revolution." Hoefler developed many of the core capabilities of modern supercomputers and defined key aspects of the algorithms for distributing AI models on them.
The ACM Prize in Computing recognizes early-to-mid-career computer scientists whose research contributions have fundamental impact and broad implications. The award carries a prize of $250,000, from an endowment provided by Infosys Ltd. Torsten Hoefler is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), where he serves as Director of the Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory. He is also the Chief Architect for AI and Machine Learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS).
Hoefler's honors include the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal, an award for outstanding mid-career scientists; the IEEE CS Sidney Fernbach Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of high-performance computers; and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences (Academia Europaea), a Fellow of IEEE, and a Fellow of ACM. The award recognizes the work of Hoefler and his colleagues to scale network design and programming in supercomputers to facilitate the use of large-scale massively parallel clusters. He is best known for contributions including MPI-3 nonblocking collective operations, foundational parallelism strategies for AI models, and high-performance networking systems. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is an informal industry standard for exchanging messages between numerous individual nodes throughout an HPC network. Hoefler's working on nonblocking collective operations such as Allreduce, Allgather, Bcast, and their respective blocking versions are included in various collective communication libraries—even beyond MPI-3. Hoefler was also among the first to develop and discover the now well-known notion of "3D parallelism", and he and his collaborators have continued to develop techniques for efficient pipelining, sparse communication, model sparsity, and quantization. This work has enabled a cumulative 10-1000x acceleration of AI workloads in modern computers. Hoeflter and his colleagues also developed low-level network routing protocols and network topologies for networks such as Myrinet and InfiniBand. These power thousands of AI and HPC supercomputers. ACM President Yannis Ioannidis said that while the capacity of high-performance computers has become mind-boggling, they could do little without the underlying algorithms and standards that allow them to process massive influxes of data, and that Hoefler's innovations remain the definitive way to program massively parallel systems today. Salil Parekh, Chief Executive Officer, Infosys, said that Hoefler played an important role in advancing high-performance computing, which in turn, fuelled the current AI revolution. "With much of his important work being done in his 20s, Hoefler is an example for young people that age is not an obstacle to achievement in computing."
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 04 April 2025 ) |
